Using social media at events is a great way to create an interactive guest experience. You can also use social media as a tool to promote your event. When incorporating social media into your event guests will be able to post live tweets or photos of the event onto projectors or TV’s strategically placed around the event. It is a fun way for guests to get involved. Having social media interaction at your event will benefit the attendees by creating an immersive experience. However, that is not all it will do. Having guests use social media at events will also create awareness and promotion of your event to the public outside of your event on social media. So how do you successfully incorporate social media into your live event? Below are two of the best ways to do so!
Twitter Live Feed
Twitter allows for a real-time conversation at and about your events. To make twitter live feeds successful incorporate a hashtag specific to the event. This will allow guests to use the hashtag to join or influence the event conversation. Use a program like TweetDeck to manage your feed and see incoming posts.
Assign a person to stay on TweetDeck to manage the conversations and respond quickly to anything attendees post. This will keep guests acknowledged and engaged. Retweet anything you find engaging to make guests feel even more special.
Don’t just stop at live interaction. Use a system like Buffer to schedule tweets throughout the day. You can include posts for when key speakers sessions are, networking opportunities and events, a morning tweet about key events of the day, even contests. By scheduling tweets ahead of time you can save time at the event and allow you to focus your efforts on activities as they happen. When speaking about guests and speakers be sure to use their twitter handle within your tweet for additional engagement and visibility.
Be sure to use twitter to the fullest by placing moderated live-feeds throughout the conference so everyone can see tweets. This will encourage guests to become engaged. You could have a TV with the tweets at check in, and throughout main areas. Another great way to incorporate twitter is to have guests tweet questions at speakers, and when time for questions after the presentations allow speakers to answer questions directly from twitter.
Instagram is a great way to show people visually what your event is like. You can have attendees post a live feed of your event. Also, Instagram is a fantastic way to show guests glimpses of the behind the scenes at events.
A unique option we offer at Endless Entertainment is Instagram-to-Screen. At your event, guests can use the popular social media app Instagram to take photos. Your guests will then post their photos to Instagram with your event’s designated hashtag. After photos are uploaded to Instagram with your event hashtag the photo will be sent to our event Instagram monitor which will sort through and add approved photos into a queue that will stream on your screens and monitors throughout the event. Guests love seeing the images they took large on the screen and it adds a great way for people to interact and create memories. Ask our account managers about using Instagram-to-Screen at your next event.
Make sure to use to photos from Instagram to post on other social media as well such as Facebook updates and Twitter.
Hashtags
No matter which social media platform you use, it is important to create one hashtag for the event. Post this hashtag on every event promotion. Make sure to keep the hashtag short and simple. Keep it at the bottom of your social media screens, make announcements and do everything you can to keep the hashtag strong. If you do not variations of the hashtag will begin to pop up and you will have fewer people using the correct one making your social media streaming not as powerful.
If you are interested in using live twitter feeds or Instagram-to-Screen contact us to get started!
